How a hoaxer created sharemarket havoc

Peter Ker and Ben Cubby

ONE young man sitting in a forest used a laptop and a mobile phone to temporarily wipe more than $314 million off the value of Nathan Tinkler's Whitehaven Coal on Monday morning.

The Australian Securities and Investments Commission is now investigating the elaborate hoax, in which anti-coal campaigners issued a fake press release and impersonated a corporate affairs spokesman from ANZ Bank.

The hoax press release said ANZ had reversed a decision to provide a $1.2 billion loan to Whitehaven - of which embattled magnate Mr Tinkler is the main shareholder - sparking a sudden sharemarket sell-off when it was emailed to journalists at 11.44am. The company's price dropped about 8.8 per cent and Whitehaven was put into a trading halt. It resumed trading in the afternoon after news of the hoax spread, and shares closed at $3.50, just 2¢ lower than Friday's closing price.

Whitehaven recovered all but $20.38 million of the $314 million it had lost.

The recovery will be of no comfort to investors who sold during the price plunge, with ASIC confirming the trades would not be cancelled.

Whitehaven Coal said it would investigate ''any legal action that might be available to it and its shareholders''. ASIC said it ''will be speaking to the people involved''.

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The hoax was co-ordinated by Jonathan Moylan, a 24-year-old Newcastle man with a history of participation in protests against coal mines and an aluminium smelter in NSW.

He has been involved in a protest camp against coal mining in NSW's Leard State Forest - the site of a proposed White-haven mine, near Narrabri - for the past 158 days. The hoax had been created in the forest camp using its sporadic internet connection, he said.

Mr Moylan and an activist group called Frontline Action on Coal created the fake press release, using a real ANZ release as a template, and purchased a website name and dummy ANZ email address for about $25 on the internet.

Mr Moylan also initially posed as a corporate affairs spokesman for ANZ when contacted by Fairfax Media. He later apologised for lying and justified the hoax by saying it was worth it to draw attention to the potential environmental problems of the open-cut mine.

''We have been campaigning against ANZ for a while now because we believe that if customers of the bank knew their money was being used to finance coal, they'd object to that,'' he said.

Asked if he had qualms about lying to the public to achieve environmental ends, Mr Moylan said: ''Our primary concern is the impact of this mine on the environment at the end of the day. A lot of people were taken in by it, but when you compare the cost of that to the health of our forests and farmlands, it justifies it.''

Whitehaven managing director Tony Haggarty said the company ''will liaise with the ASX and ASIC in relation to Mr Moylan's irresponsible and ill-conceived conduct and trusts those authorities to take the appropriate action''.